The Lesser of Two Weevils

Left: the Wall Street Raptor Weevil. Right: the Angry Populist Weevil.

E.M.

Melania’s “Plagiarism”: A Conspirator in the Trump Team?

Honestly I feel sorry for Melania Trump. I watched her speech at the RNC and thought she did an impressive job. And now it turns out that some lines from that speech were almost certainly lifted from the 2008 convention speech by Michelle Obama.

Amazing. But how is it possible?

No one assumes that such a high-profile speech from a candidate’s spouse will be entirely written by the speaker. Especially if the speaker, as in Melania’s case, speaks English as a second language.

The Trump campaign acknowledges that Melania worked with a speech writer. So the obvious question is: How did Michelle Obama’s lines end up in Melania’s speech?

A friend of mine, poet John Poch, posted a theory on his Facebook wall. Although he was only half serious, I think he may be onto something: “I have a conspiracy theory, because craziness sometimes makes too much sense. One of Trump's speechwriters (a Democratic plant) plagiarized Michelle Obama on purpose. That person knew the speech would immediately be recognized . . . by everyone except the Trump camp, who are so unaware of things like spellcheck or plagiarism tools like turnitin.com or even basic things like famous speeches by famous ladies. . . . I mean, it's too bad to be true, right? A lot of smeared mascara last night after she found out she'd been tricked. Whoever it is, wow. Just wow."

Sounds crazy, right? But actually not. Because again: How else would those lines have ended up where they did? Whoever fed them to Melania must have known where they came from, and no speech writer in the Trump campaign would have been dumb enough to expect them to go unnoticed.

I wouldn’t so much suspect a Democratic plant as an anti-Trump GOP insider being responsible. Who all was helping Melania on this speech?

As my friend John writes: “Can you imagine the middle of the night meeting with the speech writers? Can you hear the shouting and the overturning of furniture!? I can.”

Eric Mader

Update: Well, the NYT has since put paid to our theory. Or rather, it seems that the conspirator may very well be . . . one Meredith McIver.

According to sources, Melania had a speech written for her by two former Bush speech writers, but didn't like it, so set to revising it, turning to McIver:

But Ms. Trump decided to revise it, and at one point she turned to a trusted hand: Meredith McIver, a New York City-based former ballet dancer and English major who has worked on some of Mr. Trump’s books, including “Think Like a Billionaire.” It was not clear how much of a hand Ms. McIver had in the final product, and she did not respond to an email on Tuesday.

Research for the speech, it seems, drew them to the previous convention speeches delivered by candidates’ spouses.

Ouch. Depressing all around. Michelle Obama's words likely ended up in Melania's speech via sheer bumbling. John's theory is much more interesting, no?

But one still wonders. Why did Melania's speech writer or writers, whoever they were, have Melania quote specifically Mrs. Obama? And why specifically on honesty? And why did these writers lead Melania to rickroll the RNC audience? Isn't there's something here that hints at more than just an embarrassing gaffe? Or is my conspiratorial side working over time?

>>>Check out my book Idiocy, Ltd. at Amazon.com and begin the long, hard reckoning.<<<

Salmon Fishing at Langara Lodge

Well, I did hold first place for a couple days.
Chinook Salmon caught at Haida Gwaii.
When you’re angling for salmon all day, the very best thing to dine on at night, if you can manage it, is of course salmon. And it would be best if the salmon you dined on were the same salmon you hooked during the day.

But it’s impossible. In the dining room where we ate--and Chef Jason was extraordinary--they’re not allowed to serve fish the anglers caught out on the water. The fish you caught hasn’t gone through the necessary health inspections required by the Canadian government, and the lodge is obliged to follow code.

No matter. I still ordered salmon at least twice during our four-day trip. Likely flown in from Vancouver. And it was excellent even if not caught in our boat. Besides, the dining room had three or four dishes on offer each night (steak, lamb, sablefish, etc.) and any choice you opted for would be excellent, thanks to Jason and team. Langara Lodge, way up in the Canadian wilderness, also has its own pastry chef, believe it or not, and this pastry chef, named Donesh, does some amazing things. Not your typical fishing outpost in the woods by any means.

My father invited me to this place, Langara Fishing Lodge, and it was by a long shot the best of the dozen or so fishing trips I’d been on with him. Langara is a small island at the top of the Haida Gwaii island chain just off the northwest Pacific coast of Canada. On a clear day you can see the southern coast of Alaska across the water. The island chain is named for the Haida people that had occupied it for centuries before Europeans arrived.

We were fishing mainly for chinook salmon, but also caught coho salmon and bottom fished a bit for halibut too.

The scenery is part of the allure: rugged uninhabited coastline, mist hanging in the endless miles of fir, bald eagles spying us from the rocks as we fished, hoping we’d toss them a fish now and then. Yes, the eagle on duty will swoop down and take a dead fish off the surface of the water--a rock fish or any other species tossed back in the ocean that wouldn’t live.

I saw humpback whales, and on two of the four days there a pod of fifty or so orcas was passing through. The orcas managed to chase away or eat many of the chinook in the area, so their presence made for a mid-trip lull in the fishing. Sometimes an hour would pass without a bite.

But generally the fishing was great, and I managed to pull off a coup of sorts the second day, hooking and landing a 34.5 lb. chinook. My fish stood as the biggest caught by any of the 75 anglers there, a title that held for most of the trip. And I’d never fished salmon before.

One challenge fishing Haida Gwaii is keeping an eye on the sea lions, who spend their days stealing fish off the line. Our top-notch guide Layne Stewart, spotting one in the area, would usually just say: “Reel up. We’re outa here.” Sea lions, sometimes growing up to 2,200 pounds, swim round the boats waiting for an angler to hook a fish. Then, when the angler has tired the fish and gotten it near the boat, the lazy predator will close in and do its best to poach it. In one instance Layne maneuvered the fish and our boat brilliantly so as to keep one of these moochers at bay.

Second to last day, in the dining room, we sat next to a retired Austrian gentleman who’d fished the world, mainly as a fly fisherman. We didn’t exchange names that night, but learned he’d made a career as a congress organizer and had offices in Prague, Vienna and Shanghai. We talked politics and fishing, and finally he made a friendly bet with me that on the last day he’d displace me from my title to largest salmon in the lodge. It was statistically unlikely of course.

Next day my father and I got a late start, the Austrian gentleman had gotten out much earlier, but when we came down to breakfast he was there in the dining room. Why?

“My guide has fallen ill,” he said. “He needed to come in and take a break for a couple hours. We’ll try heading out again later. It’s terrible bad luck for me if I’m to beat your fish.”

Later in the afternoon, when everyone had returned to the lodge, I went up to the whiteboard where the day’s notable catches are marked, and saw that someone had pulled in a 45 lb. salmon, putting me in second place. Again, with 75 fishermen on the board, it was very unlikely that our Austrian friend had snatched my title.

I went into the dining room and found him there.

“Well,” he said offhandedly. “I did alright today.”

“Actually we never got your name last night. You are . . . ?”

“Rainer Kostka.”

It was the name on the board.

“You bastard!” I shouted, breaking into a laugh and slapping him on the shoulder.

“Heh heh heh. It’s the Tyrolean stamina you know. We’re not to be defeated.”

“You stole my fish!” my father complained. “That was my fish.”

Rainer had landed the winning chinook in a little stretch of water my father and I had trolled not an hour before he got there.

It was good fun. We congratulated him and later that evening, during dinner, his win was announced and he was compelled to dance round the dining room in a Hawaiian-themed victory dance with a troupe of staff members, dressed for the occasion in faux-Hawaiian outfits.

So at least I didn’t have to do that dance.

Langara Fishing Lodge is a brilliantly run operation. All the staff were great fun, helpful in every way, and as I’ve said, the food was extraordinary. The lodge fillets and freezes your salmon for you and boxes it in cool packs so you can take it home at the end of the trip. Having to return eventually to Taiwan, I couldn’t take that option, but I could get my salmon canned and shipped. My two best catches made for around fifty cans of salmon.

To get to Langara you start at Vancouver, flying first by jet to a small town on the main island of Haida Gwaii. From there it's a short flight by helicopter to the lodge.

Layne Stewart was the sharpest fishing guide I’ve ever fished with. A student of marine biology, he can tell you much about the tides, the whales, the salmon, and helps tweak your angling skills so as to maximize your likelihood of getting those hard-fighting chinook in the boat.

Many thanks to my father, Victor Mader, for bringing me along to one of the best salmon fisheries on the globe. He’s always praised Langara, and now I get it.

Eric Mader

Boarding the helicopter to Langara

Langara Lodge from the water. The dining room, kitchen, and guest rooms are on a barge.

Some chinooks caught with my father.

The killer whales showed up Day 2.

Our awesome guide Layne Stewart.

Bald eagle respectfully waiting for handouts.

A man and his halibut.

The Illogic of FBI Director James Comey: In a Nutshell

Having my coffee this morning I was treated to an interesting bit of political theater. FBI director James Comey first explained in detail how Hillary Clinton was guilty of committing a felony under federal law, then explained that his bureau would not recommend she be indicted for that felony.

Huh?

The laws under which Clinton could be indicted for her use of a private email server criminalize at least two things. One might either 1) intend to transmit classified information, or 2) show gross negligence in the handing of classified information.

Listening to Comey, I can only conclude that he intentionally obscured the importance of the “or” that separates 1) and 2). Comey read it as an and, implying that no prosector would pursue a case against Clinton because the investigation found no evidence of intent to transmit classified information.

But our law doesn’t merely criminalize intent, it criminalizes gross negligence as well.

Bizarrely, according to Comey’s logic, to commit a felony one must both intend to betray secrets and then show gross negligence in handling those secrets. This simply doesn’t make legal, or even practical, sense. If I intend to betray information, I’m not then going to show gross negligence in handling it. The relevant statues refer to two distinct crimes, having nothing to do with each other. To be guilty of one, Clinton doesn’t have to be guilty of both, as any prosecutor would know.

It gets worse. Comey himself stated that top secret information may very well have been stolen by our enemies thanks to Clinton’s insistence on transmitting it through her unsecured private email server:

We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account. We also assess that Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.

As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was responsible for handling classified information carefully. She knowingly did the opposite. Which is why the following sentence from Comey literally contradicts itself:

Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

Federal law already makes gross negligence a crime for which one may be imprisoned up to ten years. I don’t know about you, but I don’t find any clear difference between “extremely careless” and “grossly negligent”. Comey basically laid out why the Secretary of State is guilty of a felony.

What kind of information was compromised? Clinton has repeatedly said that no classified information was transmitted through her private server. She was lying. Comey:

For example, seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the same matters. There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation. In addition to this highly sensitive information, we also found information that was properly classified as Secret by the U.S. Intelligence Community at the time it was discussed on e-mail (that is, excluding the later “up-classified” e-mails).

None of these e-mails should have been on any kind of unclassified system, but their presence is especially concerning because all of these e-mails were housed on unclassified personal servers not even supported by full-time security staff, like those found at Departments and Agencies of the U.S. Government—or even with a commercial service like Gmail.

There is no excuse for this. Hillary Clinton knew full well what she was doing, and although she may not have intended to compromise classified information, it is obvious she didn’t much care if it got compromised. The evident priority for Clinton in all of this was being able to conduct business through her own server and email account, from which she could then delete and scrub whatever she liked without any oversight or permanent record. And why would she want to do such scrubbing?

Study a bit about the Clinton Foundation and you may get an inkling why.

Eric Mader

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. at Amazon.com and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Anderson Cooper: Ex-Journalist Turns Gay Pit Bull

Watch this interview Anderson Cooper did on CNN and see if it doesn’t make you cringe.

Pam Bondi is Florida’s Attorney General and is busy attending to her duties in the aftermath of the most gruesome crime in her state's history. CNN's Cooper, however, spends zero time during the interview asking about concrete actions being taken, but chooses instead to raise that immature and whiny cudgel raised by others in the LGBT community since the Orlando attack--namely: But you, [insert name], oppose certain LGBT legislation, so how can you show sympathy for the Orlando victims? Isn’t that hypocritical?

Yes, Cooper has crawled right down to this level. On a par with the worst of campus PC posing.

It really disgusts me that I even need to clarify something so obvious, but apparently there are people in America no longer capable of making simple distinctions, so here goes: A person might oppose same-sex marriage, or oppose certain legal initiatives of the trans movement, while still caring for LGBT people.

There. Get it? Wow--huh?

Or: A person might disagree with LGBT activists on this or that, but still be able to recognize the Orlando massacre as a horrible crime, and still feel deep sympathy for the many victims.

Cooper doesn’t seem to get this. Has he mentally reverted to Kindergarten? He uses his time here with Bondi to do noting but submit her to ideological bullying--five minutes straight!--absurdly implying she can have no sympathy for gay murder victims and their loved ones unless she subscribes to the whole gay agenda. This is not journalism, it’s PC grandstanding and ranting of the cheapest kind, and it demonstrates zero understanding of what makes America work: that we as a people recognize the rights of individual Americans to hold to different value systems.

The worst of it by far comes when Cooper reveals that he has scoured Bondi’s tweets over the past year and castigates her for not having tweeted enough pro-LGBT tweets.

What the fuck? Bondi is guilty of insufficient pro-gay tweeting? Do our public officials now have to wear rainbow pins on their lapels or demonstrate that they have raised at least one trans child to keep their jobs?

Cooper’s daring to mention Bondi’s tweet history this way shows the LGBT activist mindset in a nutshell. They are not content to live and let live. No, they have now gotten to the point that if you don’t actively wave rainbow flags and come out in praise of their movement, they will define you as the enemy. And they will do what they can to ruin your career. It has happened before. It is happening as I type. Consider the case of Atlanta fire chief Kelvin Cochran, summarily fired merely because he published a book defending Christian ideas of marriage. There are many more such cases. Ruining a person's career because of his or her religion is utterly un-American. That doesn't matter to our new LGBT commissars.

The only moment where Cooper approaches anything like pertinence is when he points out that if Florida’s previous constitutional ban on same-sex marriage had stood, then some gay partners of hospitalized victims would not have automatic visitation rights. But even this is not all that pertinent, if only for the fact that, given the low “marriage” rates among gay men and given the young age of the partiers in that club, there may not be more than a few instances where the legal status married would even come into play. Bondi correctly responded that she was working on clearing the path for victims’ loved ones to get visitation, which is what is needed in this case.

All in all, however, Bondi didn’t handle Cooper’s bullying well. In fact, I’d say she more or less caved, even demeaning herself to mentioning a new rainbow-themed tweet she’d put up. She should have been brave enough to say simply: “Listen, Anderson, I don’t have to agree with everything put forward by the LGBT movement to recognize gays and lesbians as Florida citizens and fellow human beings. I’m working here to help real people after a horrendous crime, one likely committed by a sadly mixed up gay man, and I’m a bit busy now to worry about how some people might find this or that irony in my political or tweeting background.”

And Cooper didn’t just speak of irony, no, but of “sick irony”.

In my own reading, the sick one here, suffering serious PC-induced delusions, is Anderson Cooper. Or perhaps the sick one is the whole of American society for putting up with these bullies.

Eric Mader

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. at Amazon.com and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Surprise Surprise: LGBT Activists Already Blaming Christians for the Orlando Attack

Not even a day had passed since the horrific ISIS-inspired massacre in Orlando, and already our LGBT cadres were doing their best to place the blame on Christians.

It’s disgusting.

Transgender ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio couldn’t resist the opportunity the attacks offered and tweeted as follows:



And:



The message is clear. In trying to prevent further atrocities of this sort, we shouldn’t focus on the murderous Islamist movements that inspire them, but rather on American Christians who aren't eager to bow to the ever-more-authoritarian demands of the LGBT movement. Viz.: “I don’t care about your faith. You will do the flowers for our wedding, or you will go out of business.” “I don’t care if you don’t want to refer to me as ze rather than he. If you don’t, you are a bigot and will be fined.” “I don’t care if your daughters don't want to shower with biological males. These biological males are actually girls because they say they are, you bigot.”

And on and on, with new legal sanctions to ensure everyone is toeing the LGBT line.

One of Strangio’s colleagues at the ACLU, who has since deleted her Twitter account, tweeted her disgust at Republican Christians who dared express sympathy for the victims in Orlando, then worried over whether the Orlando massacre would lead to an increase in Islamophobia.

Oh, yes, we mustn’t let our hatred of Christians get derailed by any untoward discussions of Islam’s role in the killings.

Apparently if you are a conservative Christian, it was you who carried that assault rifle into the Pulse nightclub.

Then over at Salon we have Amanda Marcotte’s mendacious attempt to demonize Christians. Her thrust: All orthodox religious people are The Same Thing™.

The common thread here, again and again, is religious fundamentalism, whether your call it “Christian” or “Muslim.” LGBT people have been the favorite punching bag of the Christian right in this country for years. Whenever the Christian right needs to rally the troops, they start running around, hair on fire, screaming about how the queers are out to get your children.

According to Marcotte, it’s not the intolerance of radical Islam that motivated Omar Mateen. No, it’s the evil called “patriarchy”. She even manages to link the Orlando shooting to the Stanford rape case:

It’s the root cause of those anti-gay hate crimes, of that disgusting Stanford rapist’s entitlement (and of rape generally), of the thousands of women who lose their lives to domestic violence, of all manner of oppression, from child marriage to abortion bans to anti-sodomy laws.

Sorry, Amanda, I think you’ve lost the thread here. The shooter pledged allegiance to ISIS, and it is specifically radical Islam that preaches mass murder of such American "infidels" as were present in that club. Go ahead, Amanda, try to find American Christians arguing that non-Christians should be sold into sex slavery or gay men should be executed by throwing them from the tops of buildings. In fact the US has tens of millions of well-nigh fundamentalist Christians. Show me one instance where a Christian has massacred a night club full of people in the name of faith. No. The very existence of that gay bar and many other gay bars across the country is proof that your attempt at moral equivalence here is utterly hollow, aside from being despicable.

The Obama administration isn’t helping matters either. In his statement around a dozen hours after the attack, our president didn’t mention radical Islam once. Rather, he ascribed the murders to that amorphous favorite catchall word of the politically correct, that flexible and abstract thing called “hate”. John Podhoretz writes:

Omar Mateen called the cops to pledge his fealty to ISIS as he was carrying out his mass murder in Orlando early Sunday. Twelve hours later, the president of the United States declared that “we have no definitive assessment on the motivation” of Omar Mateen but that “we know he was a person filled with hate.”

So I guess the president thinks Mateen didn’t mean it?

Here again, and horribly, we have an unmistakable indication that Obama finds it astonishingly easy to divorce himself from a reality he doesn’t like — the reality of the Islamist terror war against the United States and how it is moving to our shores in the form of lone-wolf attacks.

And:

So determined is the president to avoid the subject of Islamist, ISIS-inspired or ISIS-directed terrorism that he concluded his remarks with an astonishing insistence that “we need the strength and courage to change” our attitudes toward the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. That’s just disgusting. There’s no other word for it.

America’s national attitude toward LGBT people didn’t shoot up the Pulse nightclub. This country’s national attitude has undergone a sea change in the past 20 years, by the way, in case the president hasn’t noticed.

An Islamist terrorist waging war against the United States killed and injured 103 people on our soil. We Americans do not bear collective responsibility for this attack. Quite the opposite.

The attack on the Pulse nightclub was an attack on us all, no less than the World Trade Center attack.

To suggest we must look inward to explain this is not only unseemly but practically an act of conscious misdirection on the president's part to direct out attention away from Omar Mateen’s phone call.

Our fake American “left”, with Obama as its Faker in Chief, would like to forge a narrative according to which Omar Mateen imbibed his hateful ideology from conservative Americans and the surrounding culture. Never mind that Mateen is a Muslim and pledged allegiance to ISIS, an extremist Islamic movement now committing systematic genocide against Christians and others in the Middle East. Never mind that Mateen, a US citizen, was a registered Democrat.

The American left is exploiting this massacre as fodder in their ongoing campaign to ensure ever more laws are passed exacting obeisance to LGBT demands. And excuse me, but where in our Constitution does it say that I have to subscribe to a particular fundamentalist ideology? Because indeed, the LGBT crowd and their supporters have created a new socio-sexual fundamentalism. The Obama administration, with little else that is concretely left-wing about it, is forging legal mechanisms to ensure this new fundamentalism is followed lock-step. What used to be a movement for basic LGBT rights, a movement I supported for many years, has morphed into a state-sponsored witch hunt against Christian dissenters, systematically thwarting their rights. Firings, lawsuits, ruined careers are piling up as the months pass.

This duplicity of many on the left on the very first day after the attack is mind-boggling.

An American Christian myself, I prayed for the victims and the families and friends of the victims. The LGBT community seems to be saying that unless I’m on board with transgender locker-room politics, my prayers aren’t welcome. That in fact I’m even partly to blame for the massacre. Truth is, I’m well aware that that Orlando club was full of people who’d likely disagree with me on many points. But I’m an American. I recognize their right to think and live their lives as they see fit. And more importantly, I recognize their basic right to life as sacred. Radical Islamists do not. Omar Mateen did not.

In short, dear liberals, there’s a huge difference here. You are grossly overstepping in turning this ISIS-linked massacre into a tirade against Christians.

Eric Mader

Update: Today Rod Dreher, who is always sharp on these issues, writes on further instances of this scapegoating and how the left's attempt to use the massacre to demonize Christians is only helping Trump. One bit:

Another reader sends this outrageous column by CBC senior correspondent Neil Macdonald, in which he implicates all conservative religious believers in the Orlando mass murder.

You expect to see writers for Salon, Slate, Vox and other left-wing sites making that argument. But a US Congressman [cited earlier] saying that if you oppose transgenders in girls’ locker rooms, you’re complicit with mass murder? It’s beyond disgusting.

Update 2: And now, not surprisingly, as more information comes out, it seems that the shooter was actually a gay man. So: A gay Muslim registered Democrat who pledges allegiance to ISIS before murdering fellow Americans. How dishonest do you have to be to pin this crime on followers of Jesus Christ? I predict our "left" will now start lecturing us about how it was still American conservatives who made this man hate himself so much that he ended up massacring those fifty club goers. Wait for it.

* * *

Check out my book IDIOCY, LTD. at Amazon.com and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Debbie Wassrman Schultz Gets "Personal"

In my Junk mail today I get two letters marked “personal,” one from a woman named Joy West with the subject tag “Deep @nal invitation,” the other from Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Joy says she's eager to try some "$exy experiments" and that I should respond quickly because she “doesn’t invite strangers twice.” Debbie says they’re just “10 memberships away” from their goal and asks if I will “dig deep” and make a donation.

Personal? Neither letter is personal. But worse: both are merely versions of One Single Letter. The only difference: Joy writes her letter about getting fucked in a passive register; Debbie writes her letter about getting fucked in an active register. With Debbie Wasserman Schultz it's me and the American citizenry getting fucked.

Joy--well, she's most likely a guy named Renaldo waiting to get my credit card digits. As for Debbie, I'm still sore from Obama and don't plan on bending over for "mainstream Democrats" again.

Check out my book IDIOCY, LTD. at Amazon.com and begin the long, hard reckoning.